Working Smart Comes Later

Working hard or working smart……This was the subject of an animated conversation with my kids a couple of days back.

One inadvertent outcome of having two children is that comparison tends to creep into conversations, especially when you’re trying to persuade them of some idea. It’s rarely intentional, but it happens.

My elder son is very hardworking and industrious in everything he does. My younger son is naturally talented at many things. While he is hardworking in his own way, it isn’t really a defining character trait. He instinctively looks for smarter ways to complete work and optimise effort. Topping it up, he’s also very competitive.

Since we’re spending the year-end with both kids around, one conversation….honestly, I don’t even remember the exact context….slid into comparison. And before I knew it, I had slipped into coaching mode. That, understandably, didn’t go down too well with my younger son 🙂

Partly because it challenged his belief about working hard, and partly because he felt judged.

My perspective, though, was simple.

Working smart isn’t a substitute for effort. It’s the outcome of it.

Working smart is about finding easier and better ways to do something. You can call them shortcuts or smartcuts. The irony is, there’s no smart way to figure out shortcuts.

You only discover them over time. You put in the hours, sit with the complexity, and do things the wrong way often enough to understand what actually matters. Only then do you know which steps can be skipped, and which ones absolutely cannot.

Before that, “smart work” is mostly guesswork. Or worse, borrowed confidence.

You have to do the work wrong many times before you discover how to do it right. You wrestle with the details long enough to learn which ones are noise and which ones change the outcome.

Hard work builds judgment. Judgment creates efficiency.

That’s the order. Not the other way around.

Every field has people trying to jump straight to leverage—tools, hacks, frameworks. But leverage without depth is fragile. It works until conditions change. Then it collapses.

The irony is this: people who genuinely work smart usually look like they’re working harder than everyone else, at least in the early years.

They’re not chasing shortcuts.

They’re earning them.

Now, I’m pretty sure you can guess why my younger son wasn’t thrilled.
He probably has every right to be 🙂

I would be, too, if my father used a chance conversation to drive home the point that I needed to work harder, especially when I already believed I was working hard.

And maybe that’s the real takeaway for me.

Not about working hard or working smart……but about remembering how it feels to be on the other side of the conversation.